The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Some gloried in the energy coursing through the world’s veins; others feared it, and felt with Ibsen, “We are sailing with a corpse in the cargo.” The desire for nations to come together in some sort of mutual effort to apply a brake grew increasingly vocal and was loud enough for Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister to give heed to it in 1897. In his Guildhall speech of that year he saw the piling up of arms and the yearly improvement in “instruments of death” culminating, unless prevented, in a “terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal for Christian civilization.” Without mentioning disarmament, he said the only hope of preventing the disaster lay in bringing the powers together to act on their differences in a friendly spirit and eventually to “be welded in some international constitution.” Never an optimist, Lord Salisbury did not go so far as to suggest that this would abolish war, but limited his hopes to “a long spell of prosperous trade and continued peace.”

  The Czar was neither more pacific nor more idealistic than Lord Salisbury; he was thirty in 1898, a narrow, rather dull-witted young man of no vision and only one idea: to govern with no diminution of the autocratic power bequeathed by his ancestors. His petty view of things, said Pobiedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, was the result “of the influence of the many chambermaids who surround his mother.” The effort to keep a constitution at bay was the sum of his exertions and he had little political energy or interest left for anything else. Unlike the mettlesome Kaiser, who itched to play a hand every time he read a dispatch, the Czar found world affairs rather mentally taxing. “Indeed,” as he wrote his mother during the excitement over Fashoda and the Kaiser’s visit to Jerusalem, “many strange things happen in the world. One reads about them and shrugs one’s shoulders.”

  The proposal for a peace conference was not his own idea. It originated for certain practical reasons with the ministers of three critical departments—War, Finance, and Foreign Affairs—and its genesis lay in the simple condition that Russia was behind in the arms race and could not afford to catch up. General Alexei Kuropatkin, the Minister of War, had learned that Austria, Russia’s chief rival, was planning to adopt the improved rapid-fire field gun firing six rounds a minute, already possessed by Germany and France. The Russians, whose field gun fired one round a minute, could not hope to finance the rearming of their entire artillery, because they were already, at great financial strain, engaged in rearming their infantry. If the Austrians could be persuaded to agree to a ten-year moratorium on new guns, Kuropatkin thought, both countries would be spared the expense—and why not? For whether both rearmed or both agreed not to rearm, “the final result, if the two groups went to war, would be the same.”

  Kuropatkin took his simple but grand idea to the Czar, who could see no flaw, and then to the Foreign Minister, Count Muraviev, who took the precaution of consulting the Finance Minister, Count Witte. Capable, energetic and unusually endowed for a Czarist minister with common sense and a hard head, Witte was trying, against the forces of lethargy, autocracy and erosion, to fit Russia for the modern industrial world. He grudged every ruble spent on arms, detested the interference of war and believed the arms race might become “more irksome than war itself.” However, as he pointed out, Kuropatkin’s Chinese philosophy of agreeing with the enemy in advance depended on trusting the Austrians, which was impossible, and would be harmful besides, as it would “merely reveal our financial weakness to the whole world.” Instead he proposed an international, rather than a bilateral, moratorium on new weapons. He expatiated to Muraviev on the incalculable harm that growing militarism was inflicting on the world and the boon which could be conferred upon humanity by limiting armaments. These “rather trite ideas,” as he wrote later, were new to Muraviev and apparently produced on him a profound impression. Within a few days he called a council of ministers to consider an appeal to the powers for a conference. The Czar’s approval was obtained. If only the awful pace of the world could be slowed down, he and his advisers felt, and something done “to keep people from inventing things,” Russia would benefit.

  Just at this moment an impressive six-volume work called The Future of War was published in Russia. Its author, Ivan Bloch, and his ideas, were known to Witte, whether or not they influenced him. Bloch was a self-educated man and converted Jew who, not satisfied with making a fortune in railroad contracting, had gone abroad to seek higher education in economics and political science in foreign universities. In Warsaw, on his return from Western Europe, he had become a power in banking and the railroad business, which brought him into contact with Witte, and had published a number of scholarly volumes on industrial and monetary problems before embarking on the major work that was to give him a niche in immortality. His studies and his experience in business filled him with growing apprehension that the limited war of the past was no longer possible. Because conscription could call on a pool of the entire nation, he saw wars of the future absorbing the total energies and resources of the combatant states, who, unable to achieve decisive victory on the battlefield, would fight to exhaustion until they had brought each other down in total ruin. The interdependence of nations in finance, foreign trade, raw materials and all business relations, Bloch believed, meant that the victor could not be separated from the vanquished. The destructive power of modern weapons would mean a vast increase in slaughter. The one-day battle had become a thing of the past. Whole armies would become entrenched for weeks and months at a time; battles would become sieges; noncombatant populations would be drawn in. No modern state could achieve victory without the destruction of its resources and the breakup of society. War had become “impossible except at the price of suicide.”

  Bloch’s conclusions led him to the peace movement (or the process may have been the other way around). To convince society of the danger, he used a persuasion more frightening than war—social revolution. If present conditions continued, he argued, nations faced either exhaustion in the arms race or the catastrophe of war, and in either case “convulsion in the social order.” The waste of national resources on a sterile product was accountable for the growing anti-militarism of the masses. Therefore in preparing for war the governments were really “preparing the triumph of the social revolution.” If they could be convinced of this, Bloch believed, they would be more willing to find other means than war of settling their disputes. His six volumes were a massive piling-up of facts on firepower, blockade, freight and cargo capacities, casualty rates and every military and economic factor to prove the vulnerability of the modern state. Like Marx, Bloch drew from a given set of circumstances the dogma of an inevitable historical conclusion. He believed that armament expenditure necessarily “exhausted” a nation, as Marx believed that capitalism progressively impoverished the proletariat. Neither Bloch nor any of the peace propagandists considered the degree to which the armament and attendant industries created employment.

  Fear of social revolution being an effective argument in Russia, Bloch gained an audience with the Czar and his argument found an echo in the manifesto which was written by Muraviev. The Foreign Minister evidently felt its persuasiveness. In conveying it to the British Ambassador he particularly asked him to emphasize in his report that Russia’s initiative for peace would show “the discontented and disturbing classes” that powerful governments sympathized with their desire to see national wealth used productively rather than in “ruinous competition.” The Ambassador replied suavely that “it would be difficult to remain insensible to the noble sentiments which had inspired this remarkable document.”

  “It is the greatest nonsense and rubbish I ever heard of,” wrote the Prince of Wales less suavely to Lady Warwick. When indignant he took on something of the tone of his mother. “The thing is simply impossible. France could never consent to it—nor We.” He decided it was “some new dodge of that sly dog” and “subtle intriguer” Muraviev, who had “put it into the Czar’s head.” On the whole this expressed the view of the governments. Regarding the proposal with cold dist
aste, they accepted the invitation—because none wished to be the one to reject it—while expecting nothing to come of it but trouble. As the Austrian Foreign Minister said, it would make it more difficult in future for governments to present new military demands to their parliaments.

  Dampened but determined, Muraviev sent out a second circular letter in January, 1899, with an agenda of eight topics. The first proposed an agreement not to increase armed forces or military budgets for a fixed period. The last proposed agreement on the principle of arbitration and the working out of procedures. Topics 2, 3 and 4 dealt with prohibition or restriction of new types of weapons and of predicted means of warfare, such as submarines, asphyxiating gases and the “launching of projectiles from balloons” for which no specific verb existed. Topics 5, 6 and 7 concerned the laws and customs of land warfare and the extension of the Geneva rules of 1864 to naval warfare. Topics 2–7 were resented by the peace propagandists, who wished to abolish war, not alleviate it. They suspected that these topics had been included to stir the interest and require the participation of the governments and their military representatives, as was indeed the case.

  Chanceries buzzed, diplomatic pouches bulged with dispatches, ambassadors called on foreign ministers and endeavored in the prescribed conversational minuet to discover the intentions of the government to which they were accredited. Lord Salisbury appeared in a German report as “very skeptical” and the Emperor Franz Joseph as taking an “unfavorable” view and considering any limit on military development “unacceptable.” In Rome the Marquis Visconti-Venosta declined to be a delegate to a conference “which was not likely to be attended by any very useful results.” Washington would send delegates but would do nothing toward limitation of arms. Belgium awaited the conference with “regret and anxiety,” fearing that any alteration in the laws of war would confirm the powers of an invading army or restrict the rights of legitimate defence against invasion. Berlin’s reaction seemed expressed in the addition of three army corps to her forces. From capital to capital, reaction varied little: arms limitation was “impractical”; restriction on new developments unwanted; arbitration on matters involving “national honor or vital interest” unacceptable, although perhaps feasible on minor matters. Conduct of war, however, offered room for discussion.

  Fearing that all the excited talk of the peace advocates about disarmament had caused misunderstanding of his proposal, Muraviev visited the capitals to explain in personal interviews that what Russia really wanted was simply a ceiling on the status quo. It seemed so sensible. The powers might even agree, he suggested, on a fixed percentage of their population to be called to arms, which would enable them greatly to reduce their armies while “retaining the same chances as before.” “Idiot,” noted the Kaiser on the margin of this memorandum.

  No one was more agitated by the Czar’s proposal than Wilhelm II, in whose mind the military function was equivalent to the State as well as to himself, who personified the State. The white cloak and shining helmet he liked to pose in, the sparkle and color of uniforms, the gallop of cavalry, the panoply of regimental colors, the complicated rattle of ordnance, the whole paraphernalia of officer corps and Army, and lately, the brilliant vision of power upon the sea, were all facets of the same jewel—armed force. Everything else, Reichstag, political parties, budgets, votes, were more or less extraneous nuisances—except diplomacy, which was only properly understood by monarchs and invariably bungled at lower levels.

  The Kaiser had come to the throne at twenty-nine, in 1888, after his father’s sad small reign of ninety days when liberal rule had flickered for a moment in Germany and gone out. His first proclamation on his accession was addressed, not like his father’s, “To My People,” but, “To My Army.” It announced, “We belong to each other, I and the Army; we were born for each other.” The relationship he had in mind was explained in advice to a company of young recruits: “If your Emperor commands you to do so you must fire on your father and mother.” His sense of personal responsibility for the affairs of Germany and of Europe was expressed in the frequent “I’s” and “My’s” that bedizened his talk. “There is only one master in the Reich and that is I; I shall tolerate no other.” Or, some years later, “There is no balance of power in Europe but me—me and my twenty-five army corps.” He was willing, however, to make room for the Almighty who figured as the “ancient Ally of my House.” Remarks like these caused heads to shake and people to reflect like the Prince of Wales “how different everything would have been” if the Kaiser’s father had lived. Still, the Prince explained, his nephew’s speeches did not sound so absurd in German as when translated into English.

  The Kaiserin remarked that she had not seen her husband so annoyed for a long time as over the sudden intrusion—into a domain he considered his own—of “Nicky,” the Czar, whom he was accustomed to patronize and advise in voluble letters in English signed “Willy.” Whether or not he had planned some similar statement from Jerusalem, the real bite was, as his friend Count Eulenburg said, that he “simply can’t stand someone else coming to the front of the stage.”

  Assuming at a glance that the proposal was one for “general disarmament,” and immediately seeing the results in personal terms, the Kaiser dashed off a telegram to Nicky. Imagine, he reproached, “a Monarch holding personal command of his Army, dissolving his regiments sacred with a hundred years of history … and handing over his towns to Anarchists and Democracy.” Nevertheless he felt sure the Czar would be praised for his humanitarian proposal, “the most interesting and surprising of this century! Honor will henceforth be lavished upon you by the whole world; even should the practical part fail through difficulties of detail.” He littered the margins of ensuing correspondence with Aha!’s and !!’s and observations varying from the astute to the vulgar, the earliest being the not unperceptive thought, “He has put a brilliant weapon into the hands of our Democrats and Opposition.” At one point he compared the proposal to the Spartans’ message demanding that the Athenians agree not to rebuild their walls; at another he suddenly scribbled the rather apt query, “What will Krupp pay his workers with?”

  Germany did not have the motive and the cue for peace that Russia had: straitened circumstances. Under-developed industry was not a German problem. When Muraviev in Berlin told Count Eulenburg that the guiding idea behind the Russian proposal was that the yearly increases would finally bring the nations to the point of non possumus, he could not have chosen a worse argument. Non possumus was not in the German vocabulary. Germany was bursting with vigor and bulging with material success. After the unification of 1871, won by the sword in the previous decade of wars, prosperity had come with a rush, as it had in the United States after the Civil War. Energies were let loose on the development of physical resources. Germany in the nineties was enjoying the first half of a twenty-five-year period in which her national income doubled, population increased by 50 per cent, railroad-track mileage by 50 per cent, cities sprang up, colonies were acquired, giant industries took shape, wealth accumulated from their enterprises and the rise in employment kept pace. Albert Ballin’s steamship empire multiplied its tonnage sevenfold and its capital tenfold in this period. Emil Rathenau developed the electrical industry which quadrupled the number of its workers in ten years. I. G. Farben created aniline dyes; Fritz Thyssen governed a kingdom of coal, iron and steel in the Ruhr. As a result of a new smelting process making possible the utilization of the phosphoric iron ore of Lorraine, Germany’s production of coal and steel by 1898 had increased four times since 1871 and now surpassed Britain’s. Germany’s national income in that period had doubled, although it was still behind Britain’s, and measured per capita, was but two-thirds of Britain’s. German banking houses opened branches around the world, German salesmen sold German goods from Mexico to Baghdad.

  German universities and technical schools were the most admired, German methods the most thorough, German philosophers dominant. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was the leading labo
ratory for chemical research in the world. German science boasted Koch, Ehrlich and Roentgen, whose discovery of the X ray in 1895 was, however, as much a product of his time as of his country, for in 1897–99 in England J. J. Thomson had discovered the electron, and in France the Curies the release of energy by radioactivity. German professors expounded German ideals and German culture, among them Kuno Francke at Harvard, who pictured Germany pulsing with “ardent life and intense activity in every field of national aspirations.” He could barely contain his worship of the noble spectacle:

  “Healthfulness, power, orderliness meet the eye on every square mile of German soil.” No visitor could fail to be impressed by “these flourishing, well-kept farms and estates, these thriving villages, these carefully replenished forests,… these bursting cities teeming with a well-fed and well-behaved population,… with proud city halls and stately courthouses, with theatres and museums rising everywhere, admirable means of communication, model arrangements for healthy recreation and amusement, earnest universities and technical schools.” The well-behaved population was characterized by its “orderly management of political meetings, its sober determination and effective organization of the laboring classes in their fight for social betterment” and its “respectful and attentive attitude toward all forms of art.” Over all reigned “the magnificent Army with its manly discipline and high standards of professional conduct,” and together all these components gave proof of “the wonderfully organized collective will toward the higher forms of national existence.” The mood was clearly not one amenable to proposals of self-limitation.

  The sword, as Germany’s historians showed in their explanations of rise, was responsible for Germany’s greatness. In his History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, published in five volumes and several thousand pages over a period of fifteen years in the eighties and nineties, Treitschke preached the supremacy of the State whose instrument of policy is war and whose right to make war for honor or national interest cannot be infringed upon. The German Army was the visible embodiment of Treitschke’s gospel. Its authority and prestige grew with every year, its officers were creatures of ineffable arrogance, above the law, who inspired an almost superstitious worship in the public. Any person accused of insult to an officer could be tried for the crime of indirect lèse majesté. German ladies stepped off the sidewalk to let an officer pass.